Talk:Abby/Eli/@comment-112.203.155.228-20150729130730/@comment-184.2.80.218-20180408185913
I want to agree with the first reply. But if this were all about needs, there's another aspect to it, mainly the needs of a child. A child needs friends their own age; an immortal child would always need a friend their own "age". While all of the points regarding the logistics of survival and predation territories are entirely valid, having a friend Abby's own "age" would only last for 8-10 years. Having a vampiric friend would drastically extend that. But she may not recognize that she *needs* a friend, exactly. Just is always drawn to them. And from there, potentially, a child-like intuition "Well, let's always play together, forever!!!" I'm surprised they didn't go a different route and let the only other vamp we see in the movie live to become a surrogate "mother" to eternal children. Of course, it's difficult enough moving one vampire around unnoticed, let alone 2 or 3. However, part of that is simply not having an adult who is actually active in the society the vamp(s) are trying to blend in with. An adult, vamp or not, with the more mature decision-making processes and ability to hide evidence of their crime is vastly superior to what Abby seems capable of, as even when Thomas fails to actually kill, he must still do cleanup. They're gonna find the detective in the basement come summer and he starts to decay. It was smart thinking "We need to hide the body" but childlike "We'll put him in the basement! No one *ever* goes down there!" I think there's a parallel to draw here between Claudia from 'Interview with a Vampire' and Abby. Claudia grows increasingly resentful of Lestat for damning her to eternal life as a child, never being grown. Abby might suffer the same thing, if she were capable of that kind of reasoning. However, that is more adult-like reasoning, and the whole point here is that Abby is a child trapped in an immortal body. Her suffering seems more tied to all her friends getting older and always abandoning her eventually. Hence her continuing obsession with puzzles. It occupies her. Staves off loneliness in addition to being representative of a childlike inquisitiveness. It's even present in her tantrum after Thomas' first failed killing that we see. She's using an vampirically-amplified vampire voice to shout at him. It sounds like something that she has perhaps done before. Her reaction is childish; she's upset she has to go feed herself. His response is adult and sorrowfully desperate; "Maybe I want to be caught because I'm tired of doing this." During the detective's brief investigation after Thomas' death, we see many expensive looking wedding rings on a table. The only possibility is he took them off the bodies of his victims, likely as a way of funding their life. A thought that only an adult might have. It's this notion that suggests to me that she isn't overly concerned with anyone living a life like hers; it's more that the thought has yet to occur because it requires a forethought a child isn't ordinarily capable of. The murder she commits, where she snaps the joggers neck, could be dismissed as predatory instinct. A instinct not actualized during her second attack because of the presence of the man pulling her away. Being good at problem-solving indicates high-intelligence, but her behavior indicates low-maturity. It would be a child-like leap of logic to think, Well, Thomas got old. I'm tired of them getting old, lets try one that doesn't get old. After that, the need for a guardian for the two of them becomes paramount, and one that is invested in them, so probably a distraught mother who has just lost children would be a suitable contrivance for the story and likely who they would both be drawn to. At that point it's a hop-skip-and-a-jump to figuring the mother might get lonely, too, and then you've got a happy little vamp family sort of like 'Interview with a Vampire', but with the power dynamic skewed towards Abby, as the oldest vampire. Ironically, they would never tire of killing. Thomas grew weary of it because he grew up and had no personal vested interest in the blood itself. By making them all vampires, Abby would essentially tie them to her own needs, making sure they would never question the need to kill in the first place. She wouldn't realize this, of course; she'd just want a friend who never grew old and a mother who would not die like her first one did, a tragedy she alludes to with Owen.